(DailyExpertNews) — The Airbus A380 superjumbo holds a special place in the hearts of many aviation fans — and when the last of its kind made its final test flight, it returned that love with a message in the sky.
The world’s largest passenger plane made its final pre-delivery flight on December 13, taking off from the Airbus facility at Hamburg-Finkenwerder Airport for a sightseeing flight over northeastern Germany.
The vessel, registered as MSN 272, has been in Hamburg since March, providing the basis for final testing, cabin fitting and livery painting.
It is scheduled for delivery this month to Emirates, the jet’s largest customer.
Passengers love the A380, but airlines gave up. Your window to fly in is closing now that many are in storage.
Developed at a cost of $25 billion, the Airbus A380 is the largest mass-produced civilian airliner in history with a capacity of up to 853 passengers.
The superjumbo was first delivered to Singapore Airlines in 2007 and nearly 250 A380s have rolled off the line in Toulouse since then.
It’s now been nearly three years since Airbus announced it would be shutting down the plane.
“It is a painful decision,” said Airbus CEO Tom Enders in February 2019. “We have invested a lot of effort, a lot of resources and a lot of sweat into this aircraft.”
Airbus overestimates airlines’ appetite for the superjumbo. By the time of its 2019 announcement, it had delivered just 234 of the craft — less than half of the 600 it had predicted when the biplane was introduced.
Airlines’ interest had shifted to lighter, more fuel-efficient vessels, and the pandemic accelerated the demise of the planes even further.
Assembling an A380 is a mammoth task, with 1,500 companies involved in manufacturing every single component from rivets to bolts, to seats and engines. Four million individual parts had to be flown, driven and shipped from 30 different countries.
The last convoy to the Final Assembly Line (FAL) took place in February 2020, and hundreds turned up in the French village of Levignac to watch the wings, fuselage sections and horizontal tailplane being transported by truck – just a month before the massive pandemic hit. meetings occurred impossible.
The fuselage sections came from Hamburg, Germany, and Saint-Nazaire, France; the horizontal tailplane was manufactured in Cadiz, Spain; and the vertical tail fin was also made in Hamburg.
Howard Slutsken contributed to this report.
